


Each Day You'd Rise With Me

by AetherAria



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Fluff, Lazy Mornings, Multi, Penumbra Pride Week, Penumbra Pride Week Day 4, Second Citadel (Penumbra Podcast), hey wow i'm genuinely happy with this before posting it that is WILD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-05-15 01:07:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19284967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AetherAria/pseuds/AetherAria
Summary: Mornings in the Keep, together and in love.





	Each Day You'd Rise With Me

**Author's Note:**

> My offering for Penumbra Pride Week Day 4 - Polyamory. Just... pretend with me that I don't exclusively write these three anyway, okay?
> 
> Title from the song Sunlight, by Hozier. (please lord do NOT keep track of how many of my fics are named via Hozier lyrics)

It is difficult to choose from all of the new, fascinating wonders of their relationship, but Damien thinks that the mornings when they are all together are almost certainly his favorite part.

Damien slips from bed early (when his lovers do not wake to his movements, when Rilla does not fling an arm across his chest and climb half on top of him to mutter and sigh herself back to sleep, when Arum does not slit a violet eye open and tug him back with a tail around his waist for a few more moments of heat and touch, when his waking is not so lovingly delayed). His ingrained habit and duty and infatuation with the rising sun send him to run through his exercises on one of Arum’s high balconies, eyes closed and drinking in the red-gone-amber light as it burns through the haze above the swamp. He bathes afterward under the cool, controlled waterfall in the Keep’s washroom (sometimes Arum is awake by then, sometimes the lizard joins him, sometimes there are gentle, careful claws to help work the soap through his hair), and then, if Rilla did not overexert herself on experiments the night before, he wakes her for breakfast.

Some days Arum will cook. Some days he wakes even earlier than Damien, to put together a fruit-filled galette, or - when he feels like spoiling the humans - to bake the loaf of sourdough he lets rise in a cool spot through the night, and when they join him in the kitchen he cuts slices from the warm bread for them to smother with honey and preserves. Sometimes, if Rilla slept well (or not at all), she makes rava umpa with as many vegetables as she can fit in the skillet, or she whips together densely stuffed omelets for all three of them. If the others sleep late and Damien has the kitchen to himself, he might even attempt a souffle.

Rilla boils water before she does anything else. She watches the pot, knuckling at her eyes and impatient, perhaps tolerating Damien wrapping his arms around her from behind to press a kiss to her neck, and only when she pours water over grounds does she come fully awake, almost more from the smell of the coffee than the taste or the caffeine. Damien uses the rest of the hot water to make tea for Arum and himself, the former left pure and bitter, the latter dolloped with honey.

As they eat together, the world waits.

Sometimes they bounce quiet, uncomplicated thoughts between them over the table, or Damien will recite something to make Rilla grace him with her soft, fond smile, something that will make Arum feign annoyed indulgence while he listens, as enraptured as the herbalist. Sometimes there is silence instead, aside from the subtle creaking of the Keep, and the muffled sounds of the swamp in the distance, and that is treasured as well.

Damien has written an ode, four sonnets, two ghazals, and a chant on the subject of the joy he takes in their mornings together. With love surrounding him, with the outside world and Damien’s uncertain place in it muffled by the embrace of the Keep, his thoughts run easy and untroubled, if only for an hour or so. The mingled smell of coffee and tea, the taste of honey and fresh baked bread, the feel of a scaled hand casually brushing his shoulder in passing, dark hair loose and soft and tumbling in front of sleepy eyes before it is wrangled into the usual braid; Damien gathers all of these shining gemstone memories and weaves them into the tapestries of his talent, into assonance and rhyme and metaphor that he attempts to make as beautiful as the memories themselves.

Midday hangs in the eaves, of course, and breakfast ends sooner than any of them would like, but Damien does not begrudge a beautiful thing that passes in its proper time. It is easier to face the waiting day with sanctuary at his back, and Damien knows such moments are a rhyme themselves; variations on a love echoed, repeated, and the in-between is protected by what he leaves, and to what he will, in time, return.

The sun will rise, the sun will rise, the sun will rise, and Damien glories in the knowledge that there are countless numbers of those sunrises yet to come that he will be so blessed as to spend by their sides.


End file.
